PET EMERGENCY PLAN

For those of you who have service dogs..........

http://goo.gl/ZdJh0s

The potential for emergencies to affect you and your pets is very real.

In the 2009 Victorian bushfires, lives were lost when people made the decision not to evacuate because they did not want to leave their pets. Many pets also perished because they were not evacuated in time. It is up to you to plan ahead and to be prepared before an emergency happens to ensure the safety of yourself and your pets.

By acting early, you can avoid danger, panic and potentially fatal situations. Although individual needs will vary, the information on this page will help you to plan for the safety of yourself and your pets in emergencies.

The Pet Emergency Plan initiative is funded by the Natural Disaster Resilience Program, and has been developed by RSPCA South Australia in partnership with the Commonwealth and State Government of South Australia. The initiative is designed to ensure that South Australian pet owners are well prepared to protect their pets in emergencies.

Half of adults with autism are abused by someone they know: Charity's warning over 'devastating scale' of neglect

http://goo.gl/luDjEF

Half of adults with autism have been abused by someone they know, a new study has found amid warnings of the 'devastating scale' of neglect and abuse.

Many people diagnosed with the condition are staying at home because they are afraid of being abused or harrassed, the National Autistic Society (NAS) said today.

People with autism can find it hard to interpret other people's motivations and as a result can be taken advantage of or manipulated, the charity said.

Half of the 1,300 sufferers questioned by NAS said they had been abused by someone they considered a friend.


The Disability Cliff

http://goo.gl/dXEH7x

Young adults with intellectual disabilities for the most part now live in houses and apartments in the community, not in institutions as they did in years past—a measure of our progress. But far too many spend their days employed in sheltered workshops and activity centers that closely resemble the dayrooms of those old institutions. According to the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, 80 percent of the 566,188 people served by state intellectual- and developmental-disabilities agencies in 2010 received services in sheltered workshops or segregated nonwork settings. Instead of productive, mainstream jobs with competitive wages, these individuals find that the only work options available to them are largely dead-end jobs that pay less—often far less—than the minimum wage. For some, the sheltered workshop is the best-case scenario—not because they lack the skills to do better, but because our disability policies leave them with nothing even minimally productive to do all day.


THE FUNDRAISING SUMMIT: 5 DAYS. FORTY WORLD-CLASS SPEAKERS. ALL ONLINE. FREE.

Thanks and a hat tip to Marty.......

http://www.thefundraisingsummit.com/ 

Five days of free online seminars delivered by the world's top fundraising professionals.

Join your peers from around the world for five days of insight, instruction and inspiration from the world’s best speakers. Learn new ways to tackle your most pressing problems. Learn best practices from the best in national and international fundraising. (Plus, get paid for referring customers to The Fundraising Summit.) Sessions are free, but only for 24 hours. Register today. Learn how the Summit works, and get answers to your questions, by reading our Frequently Asked Questions.


DISABILITY HISTORY: ELMER BARTELS AND FRED FAY, BOSTON, MA

http://goo.gl/LarsMP

It’s Our Story is a national initiative to make disability history public and accessible. Scott Cooper recorded and collected over 1,300 video interviews from disability leaders across the country since 2005. Check out a video uploaded on July 26, 2010:

Fred Fay and Elmer Bartels of Boston, MA speak about bringing independent living into the vocational rehabilitation community, working alongside Ed Roberts, and advocating for Disability Rights.
Fred acquired a spinal cord injury at age 16; he became a leader for disability rights, founded the Boston Center for Independent Living, the Massachusetts Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, and of the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities; he worked alongside many others to secure the passage of the ADA.
Elmer broke his neck during a hockey game in college; he soon became a political leader in the disability community and served for 30 years as Commissioner of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, eventually becoming director of the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation.


Sproutflix: Making the invisible visible

http://sproutflix.org/ 

Sproutflix hosts the largest and most diverse assortment of films featuring people with I/DD on the marketplace. Our ever growing collection is made up of feature length documentaries and narratives as well as short films, animations and music videos.

Films on Sproutflix are geared toward showcasing varied and cultured points of views. All films on Sproutflix have been selected by a committee and screened at the Sprout Film Festival in New York City. Sproutflix is programmed and supported by Sprout, a NYC-based nonprofit organization founded in 1979, dedicated to bringing innovative programming to people with I/DD.

Sproutflix offers streams, downloads, DVD’s and playlists to be purchased and licensed for institutional and educational use. We believe film can inspire, inform and spark change. It is a powerful educational tool and the perfect addition to any curriculum or training program.

State deal pledges better care at Bridgewater Hospital

A horror from the past surfaces again........

http://goo.gl/G11UeV

An independent monitoring group will open an office inside troubled Bridgewater State Hospital for the next two years to make sure that prison guards and clinicians continue reducing their use of isolation and physical restraints on mentally ill patients, under a deal with the state that averts a lawsuit.

“The agreement guarantees that over the next couple of years, someone will be in there watching, looking at the data, talking to the patients and staff, and really trying to make sure that people are treated appropriately as patients and not as prisoners,” Christine M. Griffin, the executive director of the federally funded Disability Law Center, which reached the agreement with the Patrick administration, said Tuesday.

The center had threatened to sue Massachusetts for what it said were widespread human rights abuses at Bridgewater, where the Globe has identified three deaths in recent years related to the use of restraints to control patients.

Airlines and airports ordered to help disabled passengers

Just European?
http://goo.gl/h6vmXM

On Monday, the Civil Aviation (Access to Air Travel for Disabled Persons and Persons with Reduced Mobility) Regulations 2014 came into effect, giving the Civil Aviation Authority the power to ensure both airlines and airports comply with European regulations to provide special assistance to passengers with a disability or reduced mobility.

This includes help when travelling through an airport, boarding or disembarking an aircraft and help during a flight.

The ultimate sanction for businesses which persistently fail to comply is an Enforcement Order, which could result in prosecution, but the CAA said it expects the majority of problems will be resolved without court action.

It said it has been working with major airlines and airports since August to improve the quality of 'special assistance' information available on their websites.

Following an industry-wide consultation, 50 airlines and all UK airports were asked to make sure this information was more comprehensive, clearer to understand and displayed just one click away from their website's homepage.


Theory finds that individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome don’t lack empathy – in fact if anything they empathize too much

This fits with my experience when I was young. I had powerful empathy for shame and fear, but no social skills......

http://goo.gl/HX2sh1

“People with Asperger’s syndrome, a high functioning form of autism, are often stereotyped as distant loners or robotic geeks. But what if what looks like coldness to the outside world is a response to being overwhelmed by emotion – an excess of empathy, not a lack of it?

This idea resonates with many people suffering from autism-spectrum disorders and their families. It also jibes with the “intense world” theory, a new way of thinking about the nature of autism.

As posited by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the theory suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency but, rather, a hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response.

“I can walk into a room and feel what everyone is feeling,” Kamila Markram says. “The problem is that it all comes in faster than I can process it. There are those who say autistic people don’t feel enough. We’re saying exactly the opposite: They feel too much.”